


elegy

by IvyOnTheHolodeck



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grieving, Listen to Okoye she’s smarter than you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 04:05:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15307119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IvyOnTheHolodeck/pseuds/IvyOnTheHolodeck
Summary: “He was going to call you.”





	elegy

**Author's Note:**

> So I got home from IW a couple months back, yelled a lot until my family got tired of me, and smashed this out in about an hour. 
> 
> See end notes for warnings.

“He was going to call you.”

Steve doesn’t look up.

“Tony was. He tried to, at the Sanctum.”

Steve can hardly hear Bruce around the beating moth wings in his head. Not Bucky’s voice, not the cries of battle, but that flutter of disintegrated bits of person. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. He rubs a thumb along his beard, staring with unseeing eyes at the list of the living, the dead, and the missing. Bucky. Wanda. _Sam._

It’s been twenty hours, and this is the first time he’s had the chance to be alone. He’d been there when Okoye told Shuri her brother was dead. The princess hadn’t wept, which somehow made it worse. If she’d screamed, like Wanda screamed when Pietro died - but she’d held herself together. She’s hosting a conference with the UN tomorrow morning, and Rhodey’s stitching together what remains of the American government, and, and -

“Why won’t you talk to him?”

“Who.”

Bruce makes a frustrated noise. “Tony. Don’t you think it’s time to forgive him? I don’t know what kind of breakup you guys had, but it won’t matter anymore. You sent him the phone, right?”

“Nat filled you in.”

“No, actually, but Tony Stark doesn’t carry a _flip phone_ for nothing. And yours was the only number.”

“It’s been two years,” Steve says. “I’m surprised he still had it. Figured he’d have lost it under a pile of scrap metal by now.” Or dumped it into a smoothie by accident. Or ransacked it for parts.

Bruce’s hand rests hesitantly on his shoulder. “Strange and I yanked him out of a park in the middle of NY. No warning. And he had the phone with him.”

Steve sets his jaw so he doesn’t flinch away. “So he carried the damn thing around. But he couldn’t be bothered to-” He shoves away from the table. “I’m done.”

Bruce calls after him, but Steve’s already gone. He shoulders through the door and stalks down the hallway. No one pays him any mind. The Accords, the civil war, it all seems so pointless. Maybe if they’d been united, they could have put up a stronger resistance to Thanos.

Steve’s had enough people lie to him that he knows what it sounds like.

There’s no way they could have put up a stronger resistance to Thanos. They could have dropped the nuke on him that Tony carried into space all those years ago, and it wouldn’t have mattered. In the end, they’d been just as outmatched as when the Anderson brothers cornered Steve out back of the car lot in ’37. This time, Bucky wasn’t able to drag Steve’s ass out before they got in over their heads.

He’d barely spoken to Buck since they got here. There hadn’t been time. He’d thought, afterward - it’s ridiculous, but he had been planning a reunion celebration for when the battle was over. No specifics, but Rhodes was here, and that meant Tony would be soon too, and he’d always been the one to come up with the theme and booze and godawful music. Even with his team scattered from Wakanda to god knows where, Steve had looked forward to the party he’d been so sure was coming. Sam would be thrilled Steve’s subconscious has taken a turn for the optimistic.

Except Sam is on the list of the missing, presumed dead or disintegrated. Steve inhales shakily. Keep it together, Rogers.

He ends up outside Natasha’s door without meaning to. These last two years, she and Sam have been his whole family. He tries to conjure the usual flare of resentment at Tony for ruining the family they’d had together. He can’t do it. He doesn’t know if Tony is alive.

Natasha lets him in and settles cross-legged on the floor. Steve raises his eyebrows when he notices Okoye standing straight-backed by the window, although he supposes he shouldn’t be surprised. He greets her, and says, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“And I, for yours.” Her eyes are bright with grief, but she doesn’t have the same lost desperation Steve’s felt gnawing at the corners of his sanity since he watched Bucky -

How many times do you lose a person before it sticks?

His uneven breathing threatens to become full-body shaking. He locks his shoulders and grits his teeth.

“Tell me, Widow,” Okoye says, watching a fiery moon backlight the treeline across the plain. Stars coat the sky here, seeming so innocuous. “What do you have against grief?”

“Sentiment brings your guard down,” says Natasha.

“And so you stomp about, your emotions wild and unacknowledged? That is not strength, that is folly.”

“Explains a lot of Western history.”

Okoye shakes her head sharply. “And so the whole rest of the world suffers. White masculinity has much to answer for.”

“Something you want to say to me?” Steve asks.

She pins him with an even stare. “You should weep.”

“I don’t-”

“We lost,” she says. “We lost the war. I lost my king. You lost your friends. You will be no use to us until you weep.”

“And then what?” he demands, the question coming out harsher than he’d intended.

Okoye says, “We survive.”

Natasha says, “And then we fix it.”

Steve swallows around the constriction in his throat. “They’re already dead.”

“We couldn’t save the world,” Natasha says. Her body is perfectly still, the way she only gets the she’s on an op or just barely holding herself together. In her flat tone, Steve can hear _Sharon says Nick’s MIA_ and, quieter, _Laura called. Clint’s gone._ “But we will avenge it.”

Steve excuses himself.

In his own rooms, he mashes a pillow over his face and howls. He’s going to burst out of his skin like an overstuffed sausage. He barely holds back the urge to claw the skin off his forearms. Anything to get rid of this overwhelming sensation of touch. His shirt is abrasive against his neck; he rips it off and hurls it away. The cold squeezes his muscle like a considering hand feeling fruit at a supermarket.

Back before Buck had gone under the ice, Steve had promised they’d go to the Union Square Greenmarket together. Once all ‘this’ was over, back when ‘this’ meant those fucking Accords and Tony being stubborn, not Vision and Wanda and T’Challa and Sam and Bucky and maybe Tony all being dead.

Steve has a vibranium gauntlet in his room. He sets it against the wall and punches it until his knuckles are ragged. Distantly, he knows he’s sobbing. Okoye ought to be pleased.  
When he’s done, and the vicious remorse has drained away into exhaustion, Steve washes his hands, which are already starting to knit back together. Before he climbs into bed, he checks his phone out of reflex. One new voicemail.

“Steve.”

He sits down hard on the mattress at the sound of Tony’s voice.

“If you get this - if you’re still in one piece - god. Please, just, just call me. I need your help. They’re all - Nebula and I are the only ones left. We’re on Titan, and - god, there’s no reason you’d be able to get this. Just - yeah. Call me.”

Steve thought he was out of tears.

Swiping the back of his hand across his face, Steve breathes in, letting his lungs expand to their full capacity. One fewer graveside.

He returns the call.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for canonical character death and mild self-harm.
> 
> I’m on tumblr as ivyontheholodeck - come say hi!


End file.
